Vance Randolph

They adapted and they overcame.

But into this environment, Vance Randolph does some of his best collecting.

And he talks about the heat.

The summer was so intensely hot that the cornfields began popping right off the stalks.

So instead of having one original story to track down, I had like a whole list of stories to try to find that will all make up Alvin Schwartz's original Wonderful Sausage.

So the first name Schwartz gives is Vance Randolph, a man who spent years collecting folk stories and songs from the Ozarks.

Schwartz points to a story called The Bloody Miller.

He says that that version was told by a woman named Mrs. Elizabeth Maddock.

I had an Ozarks story.

I had an Arkansas version.

I had an old... song about a sausage machine and then the new orleans ghost story so i had i had my homework cut out for me um the first one i went to go after was the bloody miller by vance randolph and i found it i actually did find it so um so the story came from a book called The Talking Turtle and Other Ozark Folktales.

And after some searching, I was able to find the copy online, which it's definitely there.

spelt like the island of.

This story, which predates or parallels Miller's account, was documented by folklorist Vance Randolph and also appeared in Otto Ernest Raybourne's Arcadian Life in June 1935.

According to the accounts, Rhodes attempted to explore the cave, descending by rope to a ledge some 200 foot below the surface, but could perceive no further.

Later, he and several men returned with 1,000 feet of clothesline, fasting a heavy flat iron to the end and lowering it into the hole.

The Tall Tale Tradition.

So even if the 1897 article was a journalistic invention, de Gouraud's persistence can be attributed to the Ozark tradition of tall tales.

Vance Randolph's work demonstrates that the creature was quickly absorbed into an existing folk genre.

The Galrail's absurd anatomy, tusks, scales, webbed feet, horns, bladed tail and marsupial pouch.